I'm currently using 2005 Professional edition. The company I work for isn't keen on shelling out for a 'proper' copy of 2008 when, in their eyes, I have a perfectly good IDE (oh, how I wish I worked for a nice understanding software house instead of direct for the client ). I might be able to get them to stump up £200 odd quid for the standard edition but even that's going to raise an eyebrow or two. So I'm considering just downloading express.

I guess my question is, will I gain more benefit from upgrading from 2005 to 2008 than I will lose from downgrading from Professional to Express?

Are there any key features or functionality that I'm likely to miss? 90% of what I do is a VB front end over SqlServer back end. There's also a web module written in ASP.Net using VB.Net. Presumably I just need the visual basic download and the web developer download. Do these work freely together?

Any other general input folks could give would be apreciated.